Epilogue (14 page)

There had to be a first Seder that H. couldn’t make. This is not a surprise. Someone had to take over his place at the head of the table.

A few blocks away the lights on the Brooklyn Bridge blur in the soft rain that is beginning to fall. There are no stars out that we can see from the small terrace but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, gas and rock, meteor and planet. Soon bunches of lilacs will rise on their long branches out of black plastic buckets at the greengrocers’.

Later on the way home I return to myself. I am half-asleep and at peace. Maybe the wine finally had its effect, the sweet wine that no one likes but me, that I could drink by the bucketful. It was a beautiful Seder, a promising Seder, one that will go on without me one day, and that is how it should be. Between my thumb and forefinger I rub the pearls that I am wearing. These are the pearls that H. had given me. Actually I gave one of the double strands to my stepdaughter when she was married. H. replaced it, not without complaint and he made me wait about ten years and my strands don’t match. These are not magic pearls. They do not summon up H. from the depths of the underworld. One day I will give them to a granddaughter but not yet.

• • •

One death reminds you of others. Rather one death like a magnet picks up other deaths, making a pile. I don’t think too often about my mother’s death. She was fifty-two and I was twenty-seven. She died of a melanoma that began with a neglected mole and ended with a brain tumor. This was in the days when chemotherapy was almost unknown. Six months later my father would marry his mistress with whom he had a twelve-year-old child. I would be divorced from my husband within two months. My mother lost her life before she had a chance to brave the world and produce a play. She wanted to be a producer. My mother died be-fore she had a chance to run a business. She had a head for the stock market and she remembered every card played and was unbeatable at canasta and gin and backgammon. She died before she understood that she didn’t have to be neglected, rejected, and weepy every night. As I watched her die I was in shock. I had not before believed that such a thing could happen, happen to someone I knew so well, could shake the ground on which I stood. It could be argued I stood too close to her. It could be said that we talked on the phone too often. It could be said that I had not learned to stand on my own two feet. It could be said that although I rejected the life she had wanted me to lead—a lady of much leisure, married well to a man of a certain position and a membership in a golf club—I was still my mother’s child. Every day for two months I visited her bedside, with my young daughter from what would soon be my first marriage playing with a jewelry box on the carpet below. I saw the gray hair on her head begin to grow, an inch and inch

and a half, as if death itself were pushing forward, insisting on its rights. She soon lost her speech and I could see the terror in her eyes. My father ordered a speech therapist to teach her to speak, to learn the letters of the alphabet again. This was done so that she wouldn’t know she was dying. But she was not fooled. I could see it in the way she turned her head away from the therapist, the way she used her good hand to sweep off the bed the crayons and the paper the lady had brought.

I missed the exact moment that she died but came a half hour later. I could see that life had gone, that her skin was a different texture, that her eyes were sinking back into her head and that she seemed to be a bluish color and her bright red nails—the manicurist had come the day before—seemed too bright, too loud, for the body that was shrinking into itself right there before my eyes.

It took me months to understand that the tragedy was her life and not her death, which had been without pain and had not caused years of suffering. It took me months to understand that there was nothing unusual in her dying. Yes, it was too soon, she was still young enough to have enjoyed so many things, but the cemetery where we buried her, on a hill overlooking the swift-moving Hudson River, was dotted everywhere with stones. My experience could not be unique. I put a stone on her grave. I grew up.

But now with H.’s death I find I am thinking about her again. Her cigarette in her hand, her eye makeup running down her cheeks, her mystery novels on her bed, the crossword puzzles she could do in moments, the way she smelled of powder and sweat and scented soap and her eyes would swell and the skin beneath them puff up when she

wept, which she often did. I remember the bowl of ice by her bedside which she used with cotton wads to reduce the swelling. I remember waiting in the lobby while she had her hour with her psychoanalyst. He tried to rescue her I’m sure. He didn’t succeed. Now suddenly I think of her. She has been dead so long now. She never knew H. or the two children we had together. She would have loved my stepdaughter and taken her to tea at the Plaza and to Saks Fifth Avenue on shopping trips. She would have been surprised by how the story followed on after her death. Now once in a while I think of her at night. I try to think only kind thoughts. I am the only one alive to think of her.

• • •

Of course one’s children don’t live happily ever after although I admit I had some expectations that they might. I take from the table in the living room a large photo in a silver frame of one of my daughters in a wedding dress kissing a handsome groom and consider what to do with it now. I could put it in a bureau under a pile of old sweaters. I could put it in a drawer. I could wrap it in a bag from the market and leave it out the back door where it will disappear with the remains of dinner. I am not sure. I had loved the photo or the illusion that the photo gave of time frozen, white silk rustling, fortune looking kindly down. Divorce is not such an uncommon outcome, leaving me with two sons-in-law where once I had three. I had even considered it on the day the photo was taken. An Uninvited Wedding Guest. I saw Him in the corners of the dance f loor. I saw Him standing stiff ly at the end of the receiving line as I shook hand after hand.

Divorce has lost its capacity to surprise or scandalize. It still scalds. I put the picture in a closet on a high shelf. This is not a tragedy. I don’t have an exact name for what it is. Perhaps it is simply a short paragraph in the book of family life. I fight off a desire to put down the book.

• • •

Touch. I took it for granted. H. took my arm when we were walking in the street. He took my hand in the movies. He lay his head in my lap while reading the Sunday paper. He rubbed my shoulders when I was stiff. He wrapped his legs around mine while he slept. In the shower we soaped one another. In the kitchen we leaned into each other. And then, not as often as we did a decade ago, we did all those things that although most private are usual among human adults. We lay afterwards body to body, my head on his chest, his arms around me, breathing softly together: even the night before he died.

And now I think I may never know another man so well. I may never again even hold hands in a movie or feel an arm across my back. Many women live this way, old and young too: untouched. We know that babies if they are not held in human arms do not thrive. They do not smile or turn over, or stand. H. worked with babies whose mothers were too sad or dismayed by their own lives to hold their children. H. worked to help the mothers look into the eyes of their children. H. taught me that the human infant must be rocked and touched and wiped and soothed by another’s smell, f lesh against f lesh. I think perhaps at the other end of life this might be true also. Or else one dies quickly.

This, judging by the millions of elderly who do not

die, at least not immediately, and not from lack of partners, cannot be true. But is it true for me?

I am constantly losing my keys, my glasses, my watch. I spend too much time each day looking for lost papers, for a pen, for a stamp, for a sock. It’s as if the physical world of ordinary objects is playing with me, maliciously teas-ing me. More likely I am playing with the physical world, using it to prove that I have indeed lost something, something that will not be found in the hamper or under the newspaper or behind the bookcase.

I am going to meet a friend at the theater. I am about halfway down the subway stairs when I hear my name. Someone is calling me. I turn around. I look up. K. in his T-shirt and shorts is standing above leaning over the rail-ing. “Are you free for dinner tomorrow night?” he shouts down. “Yes,” I answer. “Come at seven, my apartment,” he adds and disappears. Unreasonably, I am pleased.

The next night I arrive at his door with a bottle of wine taken from one of the cases H. had bought that still rest at the back of my hall closet. K. is making dinner. His apartment is furnished in frat-boy style, dark, spare, no rugs, no curtains, no f lowers. No woman since before the f lood. We talk. I find out many things about him. He went to an Ivy League college. He played football in high school. He went to law school and became, in a desultory sort of way, a lawyer for musicians. He has no practice now. He jumps rope in the park to stay thin. He is learning to play the f lute. His two grown sons are fighting over his wife’s legacy. He had divorced his wife several years before her death because, as he said, they “set to squabbling.” His dad had owned an auto repair shop in upstate New York. He

had not married until he was nearly forty. He has watery blue eyes. He has the gentle way of large men. I am happy in his company. “Perhaps we can go to a movie together one night,” I suggest. “I could do that,” he answers. But then he never calls. When I see him on the street I smile and wave but do not stop.

There is no point in imagining what was so hard about calling me to go to a movie. I know it was not his dislike of me. I give up thinking about it. But what stays in my head is his story, the unfathomable parts as well as the others. I think about his two sons. I hold his life in my mind. Then I don’t.

• • •

I have noticed that I am becoming irritated all too often by friends I have known and loved for years. One says something very rude about my daughter and I say nothing but my heart grows cold toward her. I have bought theater tickets with another friend and on the appointed day she says she wants to meet me at the theater and then wants to go home to fix supper for her husband. She has allowed no time to visit with me. Is she afraid that what I have is catching? Or does she just not want to be with me, or is she thinking of the check at the café we might have gone to? I don’t know, but I begin to see her as an indistinct figure on a distant shore. I am irritated by another friend’s tales of her childhood woes. She repeats them again and again. I have heard them thousands of times. I feel impatient when she begins. I am angry at someone’s anti-Zionism. I am angry at another friend’s patronizing advice that I should buy new clothes. I should but I don’t want to. I am turning

into a nurser of minor grievances, a person I have never been before. I may be observing the signals of the tsunami of anger that lurks within. I am envious of others, which is foolish. I am all too easily offended or bored.

I will try to be angry at what I am truly angry about and leave my friendships in calm waters.

LOOKING EAST I SEE THE MOON. IT IS A SM ALL SLIVER UP

in the sky. There are a few stars visible above the buildings and there is a red light blinking on a high rooftop, a warning light to low-flying airplanes. I stare into the windows across the way. I see the blue light of the televisions. I see a fern pressing against a pane. I see a silhouette moving across the window. A light turns out. I can’t see in anymore. Everyone for blocks around is asleep or lying awake in the dark.

I have lost some friendships over the years. Now I regret it. I have been too quick to anger and have pulled away when staying would have been a far better thing to do. Unlike my father I do not yell loud enough to frighten the banshees in the woods. I do not directly confront, or create scenes. When I am angry I pull away and like some ancient turtle take my head inside my shell where it cannot be seen or trampled. In fact I have a terrible if silent temper. Losing friends is natural enough. We change and our interests change and we admire less a person we admired most a

while ago. It is easier to be friends with those who share our occupations, our politics, our neighborhoods, our mutual friends. It is hard to hold on to friendships when people move away to another state or to another world. I am a good friend but not constant. I can be frightened away easily. I have a bad track record of holding on. I regret this.

Among my condolence notes is one from a woman I had once considered dear: Y.

Another woman, a famous writer, a brilliant writer, a right-wing writer, a passionate woman, L., who reviled me, loathed me, loathed my bones, because of my views on peace in the Middle East had told Y. not to talk to me at a public meeting. Y. obeyed. She avoided my eyes at the lunch break. She walked away from me as I approached her. Y. would not be seen walking out the door with me. I felt betrayed. It was a playground thing, it happened over a decade ago. I was a lesser writer than the writer in whose good graces she wanted to stay. Y. and I, who once had lunch often, spoke on the phone constantly, discussed people and politics, in and out, stopped speaking. We lived a block away from each other. I missed her company. Now I held her condolence note in my hand and a warm f lush came over me. I called. We arranged to meet at a local café. Y. had recently lost her father, who had been in his late nineties. Y. and her father had lived in the same building. Her father had escaped Warsaw shortly after Y. herself had escaped to England. The father and daughter had remained clasped to each other into the old age of both. There was about them both an air of tragedy past, of hard times endured, of a fear of the world, a dis-